Today my guest is Julia Schopick, best-selling author of the book, HONEST MEDICINE: Effective, Time-Tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases. Through her writings and her blog, Julia’s goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little-known but promising treatments their doctors may not know about. Julia’s writings on health and medical topics have been featured in American Medical News (AMA), Alternative & Complementary Therapies, the British Medical Journaland the Chicago Sun-Times. She also coaches patients in how to convince their doctors to prescribe a treatment they (i.e., the doctors) don’t know about. www.HonestMedicine.com.

 

 

 

Julia reminded me that about ten years ago SHE had interviewed ME. Listen to our interview at The Keeper: Interview with author/advocate Debra Lynn Dadd

 

TOXIC FREE TALK RADIO
Effective, Time-tested, Inexpensive Treatments for Life-threatening Diseases

Host: Debra Lynn Dadd
Guest: Julia Schopick

Date of Broadcast: October 22, 2015

DEBRA: Hi, I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and this is Toxic Free Talk Radio, where we talk about how to thrive in a toxic world, and live toxic free.

It’s Tuesday, October 22, 2015, and I’m here in beautiful, sunny Clearwater, Florida.

We’re having a little technology thing going on today. The power company, my local power company sent out a crew of guys to take the tree branches off the wires. In the process of working on trimming my trees, they also trimmed my cable line. So I have no internet and no phone, and no television until the cable guys come.

So I’m doing this by cell phone today. Cell phone and iPad. iPhone and iPad. And it’s a little different for me because usually I have all the things available in my computer.

The show must go on.

Anyway, my guest today is – [inaudible 00:01:58] to that and now, I have to turn on my iPad because it turned itself off.

My guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s a bestselling author of the book, “Honest Medicine: Effective Time-Honored, Inexpensive

Treatments for Life-Threatening Diseases.” Through her writings and her blog, Julia’s goal is to empower patients to make the best health choices for themselves and their loved ones by teaching them about little known, but promising treatments that doctors may not know about.

And I would just toss in and say that in my opinion, one of the little known treatments that doctors don’t know about is toxic chemicals that patients are being exposed to, and rarely do doctors recommend that their patients find those toxic chemicals and eliminate them as a first step to being well.

I’ll also tell you that Julia reminded me that some years ago, I think it was about 10 years ago, Julia actually interviewed me. I was the guest and she was the host. And we had a lovely interview. And now, Julia is here with me.

Hi, Julia.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Hi, Debra. It’s so good to be with you today. I’m so glad to be here.

DEBRA: Thank you. I’m glad that you’re here too because I do remember that we had a wonderful interview. And you’re just an intelligent person to talk to.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s great. I really appreciate that. And I hope I’m as good a guest as you were.

DEBRA: I’m sure you will be.

So the first question that I always as people is how they got interested in doing this. And I know that you’ve been in public relations for 25 years. So what made you decide to become a patient advocate?

JULIA SCHOPICK: Well, it was, kind of, thrust upon me, Debra. A teeny bit of background is that my dad was a doctor, a general practitioner. And he actually warned me to stay away from the medical profession.

He did not like his fellow doctors, Debra, I have to tell you.

But then in 1990, when my husband was 40 years old, he was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor.

DEBRA: That’s so young.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. He was very, very young. And speaking of toxic chemicals – you know what? I’ll tell it right now. I believed that his brain tumor was caused exactly the way you were talking about.

Are you ready for this?

He grew up in Flint, Michigan.

Now, tell me.

DEBRA: Oh, my god.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I know. I know. But it gets better. It gets worse. Sometimes you use the word better when you mean worse, right? It gets worse. His parents were beauticians, and he lived in Flint, Michigan, the home of the automobile, above a beauty shop.

I know.

I’m quite sure I’m right that he developed a huge brain tumor. You said, it’s such a young age. And he was very, very young.

We had just been married for five years, as a matter of fact.

I know.

And you would have thought with my background, with a father who told me stay away from the medical system – well, I wouldn’t run away. I mean, it’s tumor with the size of an orange. So I couldn’t just run away.

But you would have thought that I would have started advocating, and I would have started researching right away.

It didn’t happen because what happens, Debra, when you are confronted – and this is one of the reasons why I’m out there even after my husband has gone, trying to help other people. What happens when you are confronted, when one is confronted with something like a cancerous brain tumor? I just froze. And so did my husband.

And we did – I’m embarrassed to say, we did just – well, I’m glad we did the surgery, for goodness’ sakes. And I questioned whether the chemo was a good idea, but we did do the chemo and the radiation. But I didn’t do one thing more for a few years. I was literally in the last step, literally terrified.

And then at around the third year mark, I began to get it because my husband, who was actually given only 18 months to three years to live, and he was outliving that already, he started to develop every side effect, every complication from the treatments. Not from the – yes. From the treatments, especially the radiation.

I mean, he got – are you ready for this? At 41, he had a radiation-caused stroke because radiation to the brain will do that. He also developed hydrocephalus, which is water on the brain. And they had to operate again and put a shunt in.

It’s just was a disaster. And of course, it was many, many [inaudible 00:06:59]. It was a disaster.

And at that point, I began to get it that I’d better start researching. He was the love of my life, and if I wanted to keep him around – he was already doing a pretty good job of staying around anyway without my help. But I really decided to step into gear.

And I did.

And I found a nutritionist whose area was cancer and brain tumors in particular. That’s an interesting story in itself.

We cleaned up his diet, gave him lots of supplements that she picked out definitely for him. She tailor-made it. And he started to thrive.

DEBRA: The thing is, that I’ve learned after all of these years is that medicine and surgery is not really designed to create health. That what they’re designed to do is kill the illness.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s right.

DEBRA: Unfortunately, a lot of patients get killed in the process of killing the illness.

But you don’t get any kind of support on anything from a doctor that supports your health.

And so even if you are going to have radiation and chemo and all of that it’s very, very clear to me that at the same time, you should be doing all kinds of other things that are supporting your immune system or supporting your body against that toxic thing, that toxic treatment.

And my personal view is that if we would all live the right way, if we would do the treatment, do the natural treatment before we get sick – does that make sense?

JULIA SCHOPICK: It does, but I have one caveat. Go on.

DEBRA: [inaudible 00:08:53] finish my sentence.

What I formed was as I started looking at all these different illnesses after I was so ill from toxic chemical exposure, I saw that what I should be doing is living in this non-toxic way. I should be eating whole foods instead of processed foods. I should be living without toxic chemicals.

I should be drinking clean water, et cetera, et cetera.

But then as I started looking at the natural treatment for all different illnesses, it was all pretty much – everybody was saying, “Do exactly that.” And I came to this conclusion that if we would all live in a healthful way, we’d have a lot less illness to begin with.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Unbelievably correct.

DEBRA: Thank you.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I 100% agree with you. The reason I was going to butt in before was my poor husband couldn’t have avoided Flint, Michigan.

DEBRA: I know. I know. I grew up in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in Oakland. I lived in Oakland for a long time, and Oakland is a pretty polluted place. And when my health finally fell apart, I was living in a condominium on the ground floor where they was a stop sign out the window and [inaudible 00:10:13] all day long.

The cars would come and stop right in front of my air supply.

Then they’d start up again and [inaudible 00:10:21].

I mean that’s how much I didn’t know. And I had just remodeled my condo – we need to go to break. But off the side, we had just remodeled my condo, so we were painting, and I had plastic shelf paper, and we [inaudible 00:10:39] all that stuff. And then I fell apart.

But when we come back, we’ll talk more and hear what Julia has to say about what we should be doing.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, and I will tell you more about her except that my iPad has turned off. But I do know by heart that her website is HonestMedicine.com, so you can find out more about her there.

We’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick.

So Julia, tell us what happened to your husband? How long did he live?

JULIA SCHOPICK: It’s so interesting, Debra. He ended up living 15 years post-diagnosis. Now, remember I said that –

DEBRA: That’s great.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, I know. We both believed that it had mostly to do – yes, the doctors did their part, but it had a lot to do with the supplements, with the clean food, the change. And he was feeling so great.

What got me, and I hate to sound negative, but the doctors were not at all interested in anything we were doing.

DEBRA: Of course.

JULIA SCHOPICK: This hurt me because brain tumor patients just don’t usually live that long especially if they have the kind of tumor that my Tim, my husband had. And wouldn’t you think that the doctors would be interested in things – they fully acknowledged that he was their star patient. I want to make that clear.

They weren’t denying that he was outliving his prognosis. They were like, “Great.”

But they were not all interested. As a matter of fact, one time, Tim tried to tell one of his doctors, his main doctor – the doctors said which meds are you on, and Tim told them. And Tim then said, “I’m on a lot of supplements and good food too.”

And you know what the doctor said?

“Next question.”

DEBRA: I just want to say this, in defense of doctors. First of all, not all doctors are the same. I know some wonderful doctors that have completely changed their minds about things, and their medical doctors.

When I first was diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivities and was starting to heal my body from that onslaught of toxic chemicals, I went to a lovely doctor who was an MD, and he had completely given up his practice, his previous general practice, to only treat people who had chemical problems.

He was doing what he knew to do to help us, but it was, again, very doctor-ish. There are products called antigens, which you can go to a doctor and get, and they can immunize you against reacting to a toxic chemical.

But that doesn’t get the toxic chemical out of your life.

And so then I was talking to patients, and they were talking about how they were starting to remove toxic chemicals from their life, and I started doing that. And I told my doctor. And you know what he said? He said, “I’m going to send you to everybody’s house, each and every one of my patients, and have you analyze where their toxic chemical exposures are, and I want you to come back and tell me, so that I can know what they’re being exposed to.”

JULIA SCHOPICK: That is a wonderful doctor.

DEBRA: And that’s how I actually started doing what I do, was because that doctor asked me to go to his patients’ houses. And then I had to make up a list of products that they could use.

I was like, “What? Where am I going to find these? How am I going to figure this out?”

And that’s actually how I started. It was because of the doctor.

But most doctors are very entrenched in their paradigm. And so they say, “Well, I know what I know, and I’m going to do what I do.”

And that’s what they do.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m so glad to hear that, your story about the doctor who did that because that is so wonderful, so unusual, and in my book, in Honest Medicine, I do include stories, as you know, about doctors who are creative, who do look outside the box.

And although they are unusual, they must be heralded.

Just like you tell your doctor’s story, I tell these doctors’ stories because they are open, they are wonderful, and there are too few of them, and I’m hoping there are more and more of that.

DEBRA: I hope so too.

So before we get to the break in about three minutes, why don’t you tell us what made you decide to write your book? And then when we come back, let’s talk about the contents of your book.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Excellent. I think it was the next little incident. Not little. I shouldn’t minimize what happened.

Remember, I told you about the doctors not being interested. Well, in 2001 my husband, Tim, had a recurrence of the tumor, and that was the time when – because the skin had had trouble healing from the last surgery, and all the other results, I said, “This surgery is going to be problem.”

And I was right. It was a problem. His suture line would not heal.

I want to stress that usually the tumors come back before 10, 11 years. His didn’t because of the good care that we were doing.

In any case, the suture line would not heal, and the only thing the doctors know how to do was to do more surgeries, to try to get two pieces of skin that would heal. With each additional surgery, he got sicker and sicker and sicker. At the end of the eighth surgery, he was bed bound, he was incontinent, he was severely brain injured and nearly paralyzed.

All from the treatment. From the repeated surgeries.

And at this point, to a PR client – you mention that I’ve been doing for many years, through a PR client, I found out about a product called Silverlon. And Silverlon is pieces of material with silver ions impregnated, FDA-approved for all non-healing wounds.

So with my PR skills, I was able to get the doctor to agree to put it on. We put it on Tim’s head and he started to heal overnight.

And this is when the doctors, they came to me and they say said – one of them came to me and he said, “We don’t think it was what you found that healed your husband’s skin.”

And I was puzzled. I said, “What do you mean?”

And he said, “Well, we’ve been thinking. We think it was the vancomycin.”

And vancomycin, Debra, as you probably know, is an IV antibiotic. And Tim had been on the vancomycin for at least six weeks. So that’s what I said. I said, “But Doctor, he’s been on it for six weeks.”

And the doctor said, “Vancomycin is like that. It kicks in.”

I was stunned.

DEBRA: I know. I totally, totally understand. The things that you and I think are the right things to do make so much sense to me. And if I hadn’t changed what I was eating and the chemicals in my life, in my home, I don’t know that I would even be alive now.

My mother died of cancer when she was 51. And that is so young. And we didn’t have any of this information then. That was just right before

I started doing my work. I didn’t even know about any of these things. I was just starting to learn about it.

I was only 24. And she was just [inaudible 00:21:01].

It’s just incomprehensible to me. And I have a friend, she had cancer. When her [inaudible 00:21:12] cancer started, she was only like 30-something. She survived her cancer.

But we didn’t have any of that and this information.

We need to go to break. So we’ll be right back, and we’ll talk more with Julia Schopick. She is the author of Honest Medicine. And I don’t have the subtitle right here in front of me. But you can go to her website, HonestMedicine.com, and find out a whole lot more. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick. She’s the author of Honest Medicine. And we’re talking about what she learned that she thought was so important that she wanted to write a book about it.

So Julia, in addition to the Silverlon that we’ve already talked about, there are three other things that you talked about in Honest Medicine. I wanted to pick out the one that is most important to me to talk about first, then we’ll talk about the other two.

This isn’t your order, I know.

JULIA SCHOPICK: No, this is great. I’m glad. Go on.

DEBRA: So the first one I want to talk about the ketogenic diet.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I knew it.

DEBRA: The reason that I want to talk about that first is because it’s something that anybody can do. All of our listeners can just go immediately on a ketogenic diet if they want to. And the other two are drugs, which is okay. I’ve nothing against drugs if they don’t have toxic side effects and they’re actually helping.

So tell us about the ketogenic diet and why you think it’s so important.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The ketogenic diet is one of my – I agree with you. It’s a very, very important treatment. The reason I think it’s so important is that children with epilepsy, the doctors put them on drugs, and not only one drug, several kids are on – many, many kids are on three, four or five drugs at one time.

This is just terrible.

The ketogenic diet, which is a very high fat, low carb, low protein diet, was the standard of care from the 1920s on at places like the Mayo Clinic, John Hopkins. And then with the advent of anti-seizure medications, I think it was 1938 that Dilantin was invented.

The pharmaceutical companies stepped in and started to do more and more anti-seizure medications.

And guess what fell out of favor? The diet.

And it was still being done.

DEBRA: I just want to say for a second that that was really care with everything. If you were to turn back the clock to 1900s, there were all these things that were natural, that people treated things at home. They made things at home.

And then it came along into the 40s and 50s, and World War II, and all this new technology. And all of those intelligent, natural things just went by the waste side in every area of life, and they were all replaced by drugs and plastics and all the things that are making us sick.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You got it. The ketogenic diet was no exception. I believe, and so many other people do too, that it would have died.

The diet would have died. It was still being done very sporadically at places like, as I said, Mayo and John Hopkins.

But if a little boy named Charlie Abrams had not started having intractable seizures, and if his father had not been Jim Abrams, and Jim Abrams was the Hollywood writer/director/producer of the movie, “Airplane” that is now considered a classic. Anyway, Jim, he did funny movies, as you can tell from Airplane.

And in 1994, something not so funny happened in the Abrams family. And that was that little Charlie, one year old, started to have what we call intractable seizures. That means when one seizure ends, the next one begins, the next ends, the next one begins, and on and on and on.

Little Charlie was having up to a hundred seizures a day. And Jim, he had money. He had prestige. He was able to go to the best of the best of the best. And they put him on more and more medications.

If you read in Honest Medicine, Jim’s introduction to his contribution, it quotes a doctor who says that this child, little Charlie, will be on more and more medications. That’s all we know that can help him, and perhaps, a brain surgery.

And Jim was frantic. He said, “We were crying all the time in our house because the seizure medications were not helping.”

That’s the first thing.

And so he went to the library. And he’s very cute, Debra. He says, “I didn’t go to the library the way people do today, when they go on the internet to find a solution.” He says, “My solution that I was trying to find is how is my family going to deal with a child who is not going to get better? And this is going to be our life.”

So that’s what he was really looking for. And what he found was something different. He found out about this diet, the ketogenic diet which had been around, as I said before, from the 20s, and he found studies, small studies from the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, all the way through the 90s.

He copied them. He took them to his doctor, to Charlie’s doctor, and he said, “Let’s try this.” The doctor said, “No, it won’t work. More drugs will.”

And Jim said – he said, “To my everlasting shame,” these are his words, “I listened.” He said, “And we let the doctors do a surgery on my baby’s brain.”

And right after the surgery, what do you think happened? He started having seizures again. And finally, Jim got it. He said, “That’s it. I’m taking little Charlie to John Hopkins.”

They took him to John Hopkins, he and his wife, put him on the diet. 48 hours later, he stopped having seizures. They never returned.

And Jim was so excited, and then he got pissed. He said, “Why did it take me so long to find the diet? And by the way, why did the doctors tried to discourage me? And by the way, why are people not being told about this diet?”

So remember I told you he was a Hollywood guy? One of his friends, Meryl Streep, did the promotional video to explain about the diet. Jim set up a website, CharlieFoundation.org. I’m not sure if he set up the website right away. But he did have this instructional video.

This is the wonderful thing, during the making of the instructional video, there was somebody on the staff of making the video who was also from Dateline MBC. His real job was Dateline MBC. He was freelancing to make Jim’s thing.

And he called his boss. He goes, “This is a great story about this child, this diet, this Hollywood producer.”

So it became two segments of Dateline MBC. And at that point, the diet took off because people started writing in, they started calling. And Jim had to take one of his rooms in his house to make it just for the letters he was getting.

And people are like, “I want to find out about this diet. My little baby has been seizing. My little child has been seizing.”

Long story short, he got Meryl Streep to do a movie – for TV, “First Do No Harm” and the diet really took off. And Jim, with his Charlie Foundation, hired a dietician whose job it is to go around the world, training hospitals about the diet.

Because you know what, Debra?

DEBRA: That’s so wonderful.

JULIA SCHOPICK: When there’s a child – yes, he’s one of my heroes, can you tell? Because one of the things – anyone who wants to use the ketogenic diet for exercise or for losing weight, they can do it on their own. But when you have such a serious condition as seizures, it does have to be started in the hospital.

DEBRA: I agree with that. Yes. I have a few things I want to say about this ketogenic diet, but I’ll say them after we go to break.

You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. She also has much more information on her website, HonestMedicine.com. And we’ll be right back.

= COMMERCIAL BREAK =
DEBRA: You’re listening to Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd, and my guest today is Julia Schopick, author of Honest Medicine. And she’s at HonestMedicine.com.

So Julia, here’s what I would like to say about the ketogenic diet. First of all, I found out about it from a very good friend of mine who is surviving cancer on this ketogenic diet. She said it made a difference in the world for her.

Second of all, the thing that I think most people don’t know about this diet is that cancer feeds on sugar. And so if you’re eating a high carb diet, you’re just feeding cancer. That’s it. It’s that plain and simple.

Another thing is that when you eat high fat, your body operates in a different way, and so your body actually loses weight on a high fat diet.

In fact, that’s what you need.

And so this diet can help so many people that it can treat people who have illnesses like seizures and cancer. But people who don’t have those things yet, and they will if they continue to eat processed food, you can be making this kind of change in advance so that you’re not feeding your body in a way that cancer loves.

JULIA SCHOPICK: So are you reading my mind?

DEBRA: No.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The reason I’m saying that is – oh, my goodness.

DEBRA: This is one of those things – this is the whole point of your book, is that low carb – go ahead. I’ll let you say it.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I’m laughing because as I was hearing you say it, I had many windows open. I’m sorry that your computer is down, Debra. But I have many, many windows open. And one of them, which I’m working on writing something, perhaps, it’s an addendum to my – not addendum.

Long story short, the ketogenic diet is now being studied for many, many, many reasons. One of them is Dr. Thomas Seyfried. That’s what you’re talking about. He did the research on the ketogenic diet for cancer.

And of course, it makes sense. Cancer cells love sugar.

By the way, I believe that’s one of the reasons my Tim lived so long. I took sugar out of his diet, much to his chagrin, I must say. And when the doctors said he should drink Ensure. I said, “No way is he drinking Ensure.”

You know what I did in the hospital? I dumped it.

DEBRA: Good on you. They should just take sugar out of the hospital.

JULIA SCHOPICK: They’re never going to. They think of sugar as the main dietary – anyway that’s what they love.

Now, the ketogenic diet is being studied – are you ready for this? And I can send the link to anyone who wants it, if they write to me at Julia@HonestMedicine. It’s being studied for Parkinson’s, for cancer, with very good results, by the way, for brain injury, for diabetes, for all sorts of things.

It makes great sense because here is a diet that –

DEBRA: It does.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, it does. There is something, by the way, the Deanna Protocol is using the ketogenic diet plus another nutritional program for ALS. And as you know, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, is one of the ones that nobody has a treatment for, just nobody.

And Parkinson’s is pretty rough itself.

This ketogenic diet, I am in the process of figuring out how I’m going to use this information to get it out there. It can be used for lots of different things, and it’s being studied with great results.

So that’s why I said did you read my mind?

And by the way, I do know a –

DEBRA: We’re totally on the same page here.

JULIA SCHOPICK: And by the way, one of the people that Jim Abrams referred me to is a woman named Miriam Kalamian. Miriam is – are you ready for this, a consultant to people who want touse the ketogenic diet as part of their cancer protocol.

So this word is getting out there.

DEBRA: The word is getting out there, yes.

So our hour is almost up. [inaudible 00:43:20]

JULIA SCHOPICK: Where did it go?

DEBRA: I just want to make sure that we end with your basic message of your book, which is that there are these inexpensive, workable, much more effective things that you can do. Your doctor isn’t – I’ll give the subtitle again for Honest Medicine. It’s Effective, Time-Tested,

Inexpensive Treatment for the Life-Threatening Diseases.

And you talk about these different things that we don’t have time to talk about. But the ketogenic diet is just an example of one thing that people can do instead of getting medical care. I’m not saying that people shouldn’t go to the doctor.

But the thing is that we should also be looking at these other things as well, so that we can make an informed decision, and do things that support health. And by supporting health – I mean, this is what I’ve been doing for 30 years, supporting health.

And so I’m healthy.

I don’t know if you know, but I turned 60 this year, in June. And I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Yes, because you’re living healthy.

DEBRA: That’s exactly right, and my body just gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and more healthy, and more energy, and sleeping better, and all of these things.

It takes time. It’s not like you’re just going to take a pill and get well immediately. The things that you do on an everyday basis, eating those good foods, the [inaudible 00:45:02] as well as the nutrition, and moving your body, so that your body can detox and build your muscle.

All these things that if you just do the simplest of things, then you might not even need a doctor.

JULIA SCHOPICK: That’s the aim.

DEBRA: That’s the aim.

So Julia, talk about your book more and the basic concept behind this.

JULIA SCHOPICK: The basic concept is that, as you sad, there are treatments out there. But there is a little bit of a negative thing. When you come to your doctor about these treatments, your doctor may very well [inaudible 00:45:45] them.

Your doctor may very well say, “No, the drug way is better.”

And you have to be very, very strong to know when you are interested in trying another treatment.

For instance, one that we don’t have time to discuss, it’s called low dose Naltrexone. Although it was developed from a drug and, indeed, is a low, low, low dose of a drug, it acts more like a supplement by raising endorphin levels. It makes the immune system act correctly.

It works for many, many autoimmune diseases. And your doctor will probably, unfortunately, only not have heard of it, but when you bring information, may not be open to it, which is why I’m doing consulting now, to try to teach people how to influence their doctors, how to talk with their doctors.

You obviously have –

DEBRA: That’s a really, really important thing. That’s really important to know because we’re indoctrinated in our society that what you do when you’re sick is you go to the doctor, and the doctor knows everything, and he’ll give you a pill, and you’ll go, “Wow.”

That’s what I was raised with. That’s what I was raised with until I started – and that’s what I did until I started finding out there’s a whole other world out here that isn’t the medical world, and it works a whole lot better than what I’ve seen.

No doctor would have ever made me well from toxic chemical exposure.

JULIA SCHOPICK: I think it’s amazing what you’ve done.

DEBRA: Thank you.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You are absolutely right. I’m trying to get patients – and actually, I’m having pretty good results. It’s not only me. It’s people out there like us, like you and like me, who are making patients realize that they have the power.

It may not feel that way when you’re confronted with your doctor. But you do have the power to suggest other treatments, if the doctor says, “No, no, no” to try to convince the doctor, and if not, to find a doctor who will do it.

DEBRA: And keep looking. I’ve been to doctors who dismissed me as a patient. I had a doctor yell at me once and tell me I was never going to get well because I would not follow his instructions.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Isn’t that awful?

DEBRA: Yes, he completely invalidated me.

JULIA SCHOPICK: You know how many people just listen to the doctor. You were a strong people.

DEBRA: I know. My father lying in bed in the hospital dying would not drink the fresh juice that I brought him. He said, “I’m going to do what my doctor tells me.”

JULIA SCHOPICK: That must have broken your heart.

DEBRA: It did. It did. He died very soon after. And it maybe that my juice would not have saved him, but it was that he wasn’t even open to even listening or trying. That the doctor knows this.

I’m not here to say that nobody should listen to their doctor, but it really is that patients need to really take their health in their own hands, and if the doctor is not helping you – I just have been to a doctor that I totally adore him as a person, but it got to a point where he wasn’t helping me.

And I said to myself, “I need to go to somebody who is going to help me.”

And it’s not that he didn’t want to help me, but what he has to offer me wasn’t helping.

JULIA SCHOPICK: So you have the presence of mind to know.

DEBRA: I did. I did have the presence of mind to know. I considered that I’m the one in charge of my health, and that any health care practitioner I go to, medical doctor or otherwise, they’re my team, but I’m running them. I’m not there to do what they tell me to do. I’m there to evaluate their advice and decide if that’s right for me.

And we need to go.

Thank you so much, Julia.

This is Toxic Free Talk Radio. I’m Debra Lynn Dadd. You’ve been listening to my interview with Julia Schopick. Her website is Honest Medicine. Go to ToxicFreeTalkRadio.com, and listen to the other shows as well.

Be well.

JULIA SCHOPICK: Thank you.

DEBRA: Thank you.